Kelseanne Breder

A 2023 HRSA GACA award recipient, Kelsea Breder is a board certified geriatric nurse and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner. Kelsea's career has focused on mental health support for aging health disparities populations, including LGBTQ, persons who are homeless or formerly homeless, and persons with histories of trauma, serious mental illness, and substance use disorders. As a researcher, Kelsea is interested in addressing health equity, building an age-friendly workforce, and using medical informatics to promote acquisition of age-friendly care among members of health disparities populations. She obtained her PhD from Columbia University in 2021 with a focus on nursing informatics for health disparities.

As a psychiatric NP, Kelsea has spent six years working at the Center for Urban Community Services in NYC where she serves homeless and formerly homeless patients experiencing trauma and stress-related disorders, substance use disorders, and serious mental illness. Uniquely she practices her craft on-site, going to the residences of patients who are either chronically street homelessness, residing in shelters or safe havens, or living in permanent supportive housing sites. Kelsea is also enrolled in psychoanalytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute, and serves as a per diem nurse practitioner at New York Langone Medical Center, Bellevue Hospital.

As an educator, Kelsea uses arts-based pedagogical methods to teach graduate and undergraduate nursing students at New York University. She hopes to foster empathy, prevent burnout, and build resiliency among future clinicians who aspire to work with health disparities groups. Kelsea was a founding member of Columbia University's Humans In Harmony, a non-profit initiative that uses songwriting to foster connections between cancer patients and health professionals students. She is the recipient of NYU's 2022 Teaching Advancement Grant "Medicinal Rhymes: Hip Hop Pedagogy in Nursing," in collaboration with the NYC-based non-profit Hip Hop Public Health.